Situation, Meaning, and Improvisation: An Aesthetics of Existence in Dewey and...

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Vincent Colapietro 2011

ISSN: 1832-5203

Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 20-40, February 2011

ARTICLE

Situation, Meaning, and Improvisation: An Aesthetics of Existence in Dewey and Foucault

Vincent Colapietro, Pennsylvania State University

ABSTRACT: This essay explores important intersections between the thought of John Dewey

and Michel Foucault, with special attention to the distinction between emancipation versus

‚practices of freedom.‛ The complex relationship between these thinkers is, at once, comple-

mentary, divergent, and overlapping. The author however stresses the way in which both

Dewey and Foucault portray situated subjects as improvisational actors implicated in unique

situations, the meaning of which turns on the extemporaneous exertions of these implicated

agents.

Keywords: Pragmatism, experimentation, situation, meaning, emancipation versus practices

of freedom, intelligence, suspicion.

Introduction

Richard Rorty provocatively asserts that, ‚James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end

of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the

road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.‛1 Limiting our atten-

tion solely to the thinker about whom this journal is devoted, I am disposed to respond that

Rorty either read too much James and Dewey into Foucault or too little of these pragmatists.2

1 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xvii. In

addition to Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein and Cornel West have, from the perspective of pragmatism, engaged

the work of Foucault. See Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmoder-

nity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992) and West’s American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison, WI: Univer-

sity of Wisconsin Press). In ‚American Evasions of Foucault,‛ Southern Journal of Philosophy, 36, 3 (Fall 1998),

329-351, I have offered a critique of the way both Rorty and West’s engagements are—as much as anything

else—evasions of Foucault’s challenge to pragmatism. 2 It is not my intent to bash Richard Rorty. I feel deep admiration for the person and no slight sympathy

with his project. Given my own interpretation of the pragmatists, criticism is however unavoidable. In his

‚Comments on Sleeper and Edel,‛ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 21, 1 (Winter 1985), Rorty noted:

‚I should begin by confessing that I am out of my depth in addressing this audience. Not only the people

here with me on the platform, but practically everyone in this room has read more James and Dewey than I

have, and read them more recently.‛ ‚My excuse for invoking their names despite being relatively un-

learned in their works is,‛ Rorty added, ‚as follows. For some years, whenever I thought I had found some-

thing general and useful to say, it sounded like an echo of something I had once read. When I tried to run it

Colapietro: Situation, Meaning, and Improvisation

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Even so he was prescient in seeing affinities between Dewey and Foucault, however much his

claim regarding priority is exaggerated and his appreciation of differences blunted. Dewey

was not awaiting Foucault at the end of any path forged by this incomparable experimenta-

list.3 Though Dewey did anticipate Foucault in a number of respects, Foucault’s work should

be read by pragmatists as a development of but also a deviation from some of the directions in

Dewey’s thought. This being said, the paths of these thinkers did in effect cross each other

time and again; moreover, they did so at decisive junctures—critical points.4 Finally, the junc-

down, I was constantly led back to Dewey. When I had read Dewey as a student, I had not greatly admired

him, though I had greatly admired James.‛ (39) From then and until his death, Rorty read more of the prag-

matists, especially Dewey. Even so, he was never engaged in offering a selfless exegesis, but rather always

offering a ‚strong misreading‛ of American pragmatism (see, e.g., Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 150-52).

He makes no pretence of doing anything else. See, however, John E. Smith’s America’s Philosophical Vision

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5-13. Smith is right to insist that: ‚Everyone is at liberty to

express philosophical views of his or her own, but if someone does this via the invoking of the views of

others—Kant, Hegel, the Pragmatists as a body or Dewey in particular—that person incurs the obligation to

express these other views as accurately as possible and not merely to enlist their support for notions of his or

her own.‛ (6) In his most recent book, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), Richard J. Bern-

stein in effect levels some of the criticisms against his lifelong friend and philosophical ally that I am dis-

posed to press. See in particular Chapters 6 (‚Experience After the Linguistic Turn‛) and 9 (‚Richard Rorty’s

Deep Humanism.‛) 3 In an interview, Foucault insisted: ‚I am an experimenter and not a theorist. <I’m an experimenter in the

sense that I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same as before‛ (Foucault, Essential

Writings, 3, 241). This text (one to which I will return in the body of this paper) is likely to remind readers of

a famous passage in R. W. Emerson’s ‚Circles‛ in which he announced: ‚But lest I should mislead any when

I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not

set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as

true or false [once and for all]. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply

experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.‛ Emerson,‚Circles‛ in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected

Essays, edited by Larzer Ziff (NY: Penguin, 1982), 236. The middle term here is Nietzsche, who was influen-

ced by Emerson and who in turn influenced Foucault (so much so that Foucault was disposed to proclaim ‚I

am a Nietzschean.‛) 4 One of the most important of these is the refusal to suppose that norms and ideals are rooted in something

other than historical affairs and empirical actualities. See especially the concluding chapter of Dewey’s

Human Nature and Conduct (‚Morality Is Social.‛) All references to this work are to volume 14 of the Middle

Works of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1988). Here Dewey stresses, ‚the

social forces effective in shaping actual morality work blindly and unsatisfactorily.‛ (MW 14, 220) Foucault

no less than Dewey worked tirelessly to make the operations of these forces more visible, for the sake of

reconstructing or transforming the ethos of everyday life. Hence we find both thinkers working against some

of the specific ways in which social forces minutely shape our actual morality. Dewey goes so far as to

identify morals with learning: ‚In the largest sense of the word, morals is education. It is learning the

meaning of what we are about and employing that meaning in action.‛ (MW 14, 195) This implies to a

surprising degree that we do not know the meaning of what we are about. This in return implies that (in

Foucault’s words) we must think the unthought; and we must do so, again and again. The task of thinking

the unthought is interminable. It is moreover one facet of what Foucault identifies as the practice of free-

dom. In light of such considerations, we are warranted in asserting that Dewey no less than Foucault is an

oppositional thinker, an intellectual whose projects draw their energy and point from their opposition to the

specific ways in which social forces operate all too blindly and unsatisfactorily. There are, Dewey insists,

Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 20-40.

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tures at which their paths intersect can now be taken as invitations to take an alternative route

(to deviate from the familiar road), by treading that blazed by the other thinker. Deweyans

might profit immensely from turning onto paths blazed by Foucault and his followers, just as

Foucautians might benefit from exploring routes forged by Dewey and his kin.

One way to show this is to explore how the project of each thinker is bound up with

what Foucault identifies as the practice of freedom.5 Indeed, their projects are, from their own

perspectives, instances of such a practice. Each practiced philosophy in the name of freedom,

that is, for concrete realization of the irreducibly plural forms of self-overcoming.6 To miss

this, is to miss the center of each author’s vision.7 To catch this, is to have obtained a vantage

point, from which the unique character of their ultimately divergent projects come into sharp

focus. It is, however, also to be in a position to discern, despite numerous and deep diffe-

rences, their deepest kinship. Discerning this kinship is not necessarily as critical as delinea-

ting these differences. Whether one stresses kinship or difference, the decisive question is a

pragmatic one: ‘What is the purpose of undertaking such a venture?’ From the perspective of

each thinker, the only convincing answer is that such an exploration holds the promise of

illuminating how we might appropriate these insights into the practice of freedom. ‚Every

oracle,‛ as Emerson insisted in a different context, ‚must be interpreted by the same spirit that

gave it forth.‛ So too must simply every author. The spirit, in which both Dewey and Fou-

cault wrote, is that the antecedent conditions are (at best) resources for transforming the histo-

rical present. Meanings are most valuable when providing the means for articulating in a

more arresting and (somewhat paradoxically) more mobile form—meanings are in the ma-

king. In some respects, we need to be stopped in our tracks; our impulses to repeat the autho-

‚enormous differences of better and worse in the quality of what is social. Ideal morals begins with the

perception of these differences.‛ (MW 14, 225) The birth of morality—in the sense Dewey and Foucault are

concerned with morality—is the discernment of difference and, on the basis of such discernment, a politics

of opposition. If one asks ‚In whose judgment are such forces acting blindly and unsatisfactorily?‛ the most

immediate and compelling answer is, those who are expressing outrage or at least dissatisfaction. 5 This is only one way among various other possibilities. Pluralism is indeed central to how both Dewey and

Foucault understand the practice of freedom. This concerns the task undertaken in this essay: it is self-

consciously imagined to be far from the only way of undertaking this venture. For Foucault’s understanding

of the expression providing the basis of our exploration, see, e.g., ‚The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a

Practice of Freedom.‛ (Foucault, Essential Works 1, 281-301) The practice of freedom is subsequent to the

attainment of liberation or emancipation in the strict sense (see especially 282-83). Given his historical and

cultural circumstances, Foucault stresses the practice of freedom over the task of liberation or emancipation.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: New American Library, 1987), one of the main characters says:

‚Freeing yourself *from slavery+ was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.‛ (95)

Freeing oneself from slavery would be a case of liberation or emancipation in the strict sense, while claiming

ownership of that freed self would be one way of characterizing the practice of freedom in Foucault’s sense.

Whether or not characterizing this practice in terms of ownership (‚claiming ownership of that freed self‛) is

the most felicitous one available is, from Foucault’s perspective, contestable; but the passage from Morri-

son’s novel nonetheless helps us to draw this pivotal distinction. 6 This is the answer to the question posed and indeed pressed by Bernstein in The New Constellation – In the

name of what is Foucault offering his critique? 7 ‚Any author,‛ William James suggests in A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1977), ‚is easy if you can catch the center of his vision.‛ (44)


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ritative utterance or invoke an established authority must be arrested. In other respects, how-

ever, congealed meanings must be liquefied—frozen meanings should be melted.8 In other

words, the promise of possibilities inscribed in the writings of Dewey and Foucault are thus

sounded anew, for the sake of facilitating our own engagement in practices of freedom. If this

promise is—in some measure—fulfilled here, the venture will have been worthwhile.

Situated Subjects and Mutable Situations

‚The real difficulty is,‛ Dewey contends, ‚that the individual is regarded as given, something

already there.‛9 Whatever counts as an individual, is historically situated. While nothing

seems easier than abstracting recognizable individuals from the situations in and through

which they exhibit their unique recognizability, nothing is more dangerous. Abstracting them

from these situations, fosters the illusion that such individuals are related to these situations

only in an external and adventitious manner. Whatever else they are, human agents are situa-

ted beings whose modes of expression, striving, and reflexivity are inescapable functions of

their historical situatedness.

Historical subjects in the Foucaultian sense—historically constituted and constituting

subjects10—are never anything less than situated agents. Despite the expression ‚the death of

the subject,‛ the decentering of the subject (the theoretical turn to which this dramatic expres-

sion refers), this does not entail the annihilation of the subject, much less the effacement of

agency. In response to an observation in which the interviewer (Alessandro Rivière) suggests

that Foucault appears, much like such ‚liberals‛ as Friedrich von Hayek and Richard von Mi-

ses, Foucault is in fact taking ‚a detour in order to rediscover the individual beyond the

mechanisms of power.‛ Foucault insists upon the need to draw a distinction. The point of

this is to deny that there is any individual beyond the mechanisms of power, while simul-

taneously affirming that subjects are not so enmeshed in regimes and thus relations of power

as to lack the ability to resist refashioning themselves. Subjects are necessarily beings of subju-

gation, but—and with equal necessity—sites of resistance (there being no exercise of power

without the impulse toward resistance). Foucault is emphatic in his rejection of what he calls

‚the sovereign subject.‛ This is in part because appeal to the sovereign subject is (at least) in

effect an appeal to an ahistoric foundation, but also in part because positing a universal form

8 ‚One sometimes encounters what may be called situations or states of domination in which the power rela-

tions, instead of being mobile [or fluid], allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying

them, remain, blocked, frozen. When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power re-

lations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military

means, one is faced with what may be called a state of dominance.‛ (Foucault, Essential Works, 283) 9 Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1988), volume 12 of the Middle Works of John

Dewey. Cited as MW 12. While the terms individual, subject, self, person, and a number of other words and

expressions ought not to be treated as simply equivalent, the point made by Dewey regarding individuals

bears a kinship to that made by Foucault regarding subjects. Dewey however does deploy the terms subject

and subjectivity (see, e.g., Dewey, Experience and Nature); and he does so in a manner very close to that of

Foucault. 10 If we read Foucault in light of Foucault—in particular, if we read the earlier writings in light of the later

ones—it seems reasonable to maintain that human beings are capable of remaking in some manner and mea-

sure the histories that have made, with the help of these humans themselves, made them.


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of human subjectivity erases historical differences.11 Decentering the subject is the negative

side in affirming the centrality of practices. Affirming this centrality does not entail annihila-

ting subjectivity, though it does involve situating subjectivity and thereby problematizing

what is to be understood by this term.12 To deny a sovereign status or foundational role to hu-

man subjectivity does not amount to denying improvisational ingenuity or effective resistance

to normalizing regimes. It is simply a militant opposition to facile generalizations and unneces-

sary postulations. Such opposition draws its point and power from a critical stance toward

antecedently established norms and codified meanings. In the very stance of opposition, it

acknowledges the actuality but not the authority of such norms—(again) the actuality but not

the normativity of such meanings. Improvisational agents, even those who self-consciously

devote themselves to aesthetics of existence,13 are situated subjects and hence subjugated

beings. To appreciate that the conditions of subjection and subjugation are also those of agen-

cy and improvisation, invites—indeed demands—us to envision the work of freedom as an

undertaking in history, not necessarily in any grand sense, but certainly in the critical sense of

those everyday activities potentially contributing to seismic changes (e.g., a gay person kissing

his lover in public).

Accordingly, the practice of freedom, as conceived by Dewey and Foucault, requires us

to understand the situated character of human striving. The word situation, not only in its col-

loquial senses but also in a technical one,14 plays a prominent role in Dewey’s mature thought.

Though there is no exact counterpart in Foucault’s voluminous writings, the function played

by this term in Dewey’s texts is discernible under various (dis)guises in Foucault’s. Far more

to the point, at every turn Foucault is minutely attentive to the local scene and the historical

situation in which the practice of freedom became, as a result of his patient labor, a flight of

thought.

The theoretical importance of focusing on situations (especially specific historical situa-

tions), however, ought not to eclipse personal acknowledgment on the part of both thinkers

11 ‚A distinction must be made here. In the first place, I do indeed believe that there is no sovereign, foun-

ding subject—a universal form of subject to be found everywhere. I am very skeptical of this view of the

subject and very hostile to it. I believe, on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of

subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity<‛

Michel Foucault, Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D.

Kritzman (NY: Routledge, 1988), 50) 12 It is instructive to compare Foucault’s response in this interview to Derrida’s reply to a similar challenge.

In the discussion followed his presentation of ‚Structure, Sign, Play and in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences, in The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1970), Derrida claimed ‚The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don’t destroy

the subject; I situate it; That is to say, I believe that at a certain level of both experience and of philosophical

and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing

where it comes from and how it functions.‛ (271) 13 See James W. Bernhauer and Michael Mahon’s ‚The ethics of Michel Foucault‛ in The Cambridge Companion

to Foucault (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 155. 14 See Dewey’s Logic: A Theory of Inquiry. The Later Works of John Dewey, volume 12 [1938], edited by Jo Ann

Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991). Also Tom Burke’s ‚What Is a Situation?‛ History &

Philosophy of Logic, 21 (2000), 95-113.


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that they had been shaped by circumstances. But such acknowledgment is not merely per-

sonal. It is rather tied to the practice of freedom, as envisioned by Dewey and Foucault. The

experiential character of this distinctive practice is evident in the extent to which those

devoted to this practice make of their own lives—hence, of the situations into which they are

thrown—occasions for experimentation and opportunities for innovation. The radical experi-

mentalist is the person whose very life is a series of experiments regarding (at least, in effect)

the viability of an experimental life (a life predicated on the unblinking acknowledgment of

ineradicable fallibility, one without foundations and, except in largely trivial matters, one

without certainty).15 Dewey and Foucault were radical experimentalists in just this sense.

They took the actual situations in which they were thrown with the utmost seriousness, not

longing for a transcendent perspective from which to view their historical entanglement, but

joyfully accepting the available light provided by a critical understanding of just those his-

torical circumstances.16 In addition, they took their work to possess not only the form of expe-

rimentation, but also the character of experience. The experience of thinking through situations

was, on the part of each author, self-consciously registered as an experience, in a sense to be

clarified shortly. One might reasonably ask: ‘How could it be otherwise?’—but their emphasis

on experience in this connection is anything but banal or even commonplace. It is crucial for

identifying the distinctive character of their critical interventions.

In ‚From Absolutism to Experimentalism,‛ an autobiographical essay, John Dewey

confessed:

Upon the whole, the forces that have influenced me have come from persons and from situa-

tions more than from books—not that I have not <learned a great deal from philosophical

writings, but that what I have learned from them has been technical in comparison with

what I have been forced to thinking upon and about because of some experience in which I

found myself entangled.17

To have been influenced by the situations, in which he was entangled, was to have been forced

to think about and upon matters because of some experience in which he was implicated.18

15 According to C.S. Peirce, the lives of experimental inquirers (those of such individuals as Copernicus,

Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Gilbert) were, in the context of the historical emergence of experimental

inquiry, experiments (‚their lives were so many experiments in regard to the efficacity of the method of

experimentation.‛) (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volume 4, edited by Charles Hartshorne and

Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1933), 4.31. In accord with the

standard mode of citation, ‚4.31‛ refers to volume 4, paragraph (not page) 31.) 16 The manner of acceptance is critical. It might be begrudging or simply resigned. In contrast, it might be

joyful. 17 Later Works of John Dewey, volume 5 (Carbondale, IL: SIU). Cited as LW 5. LW 5, 155. 18 From Dewey’s viewpoint, human beings are ‚not contemplatively detached‛ from the traits of the world

into which they are thrown. These traits ‚involve him in his perplexities and troubles, and are the source of

his joys and achievements. The situation is not indifferent to man, because it forms man as a desiring, stri-

ving, thinking, feeling creature. It is not egotism that leads man from contemplative registration of these

traits to interest in managing them, to intelligence and purposive art. Interest, thinking, planning striving,

consummation, and frustration are a drama enacted by these forces and conditions.‛ (LW 1, 67) Situated

subjects are, in brief, implicated agents: they are implicated in the shifting scenes of their everyday lives and


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This made a circuitous route of Dewey’s intellectual development. He was however disposed

to highlight the advantage of this: ‚with all of the inconveniences of the road I have been

forced to travel, it has the compensatory advantage of not inducing an immunity of thought to

experience—which perhaps, after all, should not be treated even by a philosophy as the germ

of a disease to which he needs to develop resistance.‛19 To render thought impervious to the

disclosures and pressures of experience is, from Dewey’s perspective, a double betrayal; for it

is a betrayal of thought no less than of experience.

Indeed, the task of the philosopher and other theorists ought to be that of rendering

thought increasingly susceptible to the transformative power of our actual encounters, thus of

enveloping circumstances (or situations). So conceived, the theoretical task is rooted in the felt

need to situate oneself, more conscientiously and critically than one has accomplished to this

point, in the actual historical situations in and through which one’s improvisational efforts

alone can generate differential effects.20

The traditional ideal of transcendence gives way to a deepened sense of involvement,

alongside a robust acknowledgment of finitude and immanence.21 From this perspective criti-

cal distance becomes an immanent achievement; that is, it is attained not by extricating our-

selves from the situations in which we are implicated, but rather by fashioning modes of par-

ticipation and involvement in which the illusory necessity of the institutional forms of various

human practices is exposed for what it is (an illusory necessity). In short, such distance is a

function of difference or, more precisely, differentiation (above all, the differentiation between

the customary and the necessary). Such differentiations are however inscribed in the folds of

the fields in which one is situated.

The apologetic function of so much sophisticated thought stands in marked contrast to

this experimental function. The task of thought should dispense its anxious, all too anxious,

impulse to defend what must be and, moreover, should adopt a joyful, irrepressibly expansive

impulse to facilitate what might be otherwise than what has been. In short, it should become

the passion to think differently, as a prelude to being otherwise.22 Thinking differently is more

their quotidian engagements have a dramatic quality (not least of all because the outcome hangs in the

balance). The situations in which we are most immediately implicated are cultural and historical. In another

context, Dewey thus stresses that ‚the primary facts of social psychology centre about collective habit,

custom.‛ Hence, ‚we need to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs, purposes of

those who are affected by them. The problem of social psychology is [hence] not how either individual or

collective mind forms social groups or customs, but how different customs, established interacting arrange-

ments, form and nurture different minds.‛ (MW 14, 46) 19 LW 5, 156. 20 Power in the most relevant sense here concerns not the capacity to impose restrictions or prohibitions, but

the ability to generate difference effects (differences that truly make a difference). 21 Colin Koopman, ‚Historical Critique of Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages‛ in

Foucault Studies, No. 8 (2010), 100-121. 22 ‚What is thought freed itself from common sense and decided to function only in its extreme singularity?

What if it adopted the disreputable bias of the paradox, instead of completely accepting its citizenship in the

doxa? What if it conceived of difference differentially, instead of searching out he common elements under-

lying difference? Then difference would disappear as a general feature that leads to the generality of the

concept, and it would become—a different thought, the thought of difference—a pure event,‛ Foucault,


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than a prelude to living otherwise; it is an instance of doing so, in however inchoate and

precarious a manner.

Doing so is inherently dangerous. In response to this question, ‚Do you think the role

of philosophy is to warn of the dangers of power?‛ Foucault responded: ‚This has always

been an important function of philosophy. In its critical aspect—and I mean critical in the

broad sense—philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in

every form in which it exists, whether political economic, sexual, institutional, or what have

you.‛23 In this context, Foucault translates the Socratic injunction ‚Take care of yourself‛ into

‚Make freedom your foundation, through the mastery of yourself.‛24

If anything Foucault is more Deweyan than Dewey, at least in the way he describes his

relation to his authorship. This is nowhere more apparent than in an interview with Duccio

Trombadori in 1978.25 Early in this exchange Foucault admitted: ‚I’m perfectly aware of al-

ways being on the move in relation both to the things I’m interested in and to what I’ve

already thought.‛ He immediately added: ‚What I think is never quite the same, because for

me my books are experiences, in a sense, that I would like to be as full as possible.‛26 This sense

turns out to equate experience with transformation: ‚An experience is something that one

comes out of transformed.‛ In this context, Foucault sharply opposes the theorist and the ex-

perimentalist. Moreover, he explicitly identifies himself with the latter:

I write a book only because I still don’t know what to think about the thing I want so much

to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think. <I am an ex-

perimenter and not a theorist. I call a theorist someone who constructs a general system

either deductive or analytical, and applies it to different fields in a uniform way. That isn’t

my case [i.e., that isn’t what I do+. I’m an experimenter in the sense that I write in order to

change myself and in order not to think the same as before.27

His books are instruments of transformation because they are designed and, in the course of

their elaboration, refashioned to be nothing less. In Foucault’s own words, ‚however erudite

my books may be, I’ve always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself

free of myself, at preventing me from being the same.‛28 From Dewey’s perspective, it all

comes down to ‚experience personally conducted and personally consummated.‛29 In light of

Foucault’s remarks, we might say that the work of experience, so conducted and consum-

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and

Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 182. 23 Foucault, Essential Works 1, 300-301. 24 Ibid., 301. 25 ‚Interview with Michel Foucault.‛, in Foucault, Essential Works 3, 239-97. I am indebted to Charles E. Scott

for reminding me of this text, in particular, to a paper recently presented at the American Philosophies Fo-

rum (Emory University, April 2010). 26 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 239; emphasis added. 27 Ibid., 241. 28 Ibid., 3, 241-42. 29 John Dewey, ‚Beliefs and Existences‛ in The Middle Works of John Deewy, volume 3, edited by Jo Ann

Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1977), 94.


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mated, is transformation, not least of all transformation of the self. Such transformation is

always, in some manner and measure, a freeing, not only a freeing of the self from itself, but

also a freeing of the self for what it has not yet even imagined to be possible or desirable.

Such a task is undertaken not in the abstract, but always in the concrete—in some

concrete historical situation in which the possibilities of transformation are among the most

deeply contested topics. To be situated means to be involved. While being situated is an in-

escapable condition of human beings, actual situations—especially in their unique specifi-

city—might be embraced in a more or less self-conscious, also a more or less self-critical,

manner. Critical involvement in particular situations is a conscientious insertion of one’s vul-

nerable self in an ongoing history. In the case of Foucault the purpose—no less than that of

Dewey—was to alter these situations, transforming our circumstances. ‚I tried to do things,‛

Foucault noted, ‚that required a personal, physical, and real involvement, things that would

address problems in concrete, precise, and definite terms, in a given situation.‛30 Such in-

volvement demanded immersion and saturation, not transcendence or distance: ‚One has to

proceed by progressive, necessarily incomplete saturation.‛31 It is moreover thoroughly expe-

rimental: ‚My work takes place between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of

dots. I like to open up a space of research, try it out, and then if it doesn’t work, try again

somewhere else.‛32 The work of opening spaces of possible research, ineluctably linked to

sites of possible transformation, is (in its predominantly theoretical or discursive guise) the

practice of freedom in Foucault’s sense.

Such theoretical work is (as I have already noted) an experiential process, which un-

leashes transformative possibilities. Theoretical articulation and personal involvement—and,

hence, direct experience—are inextricably intertwined. Part of the paradox here, is that our

experience provides us with the impetus and instruments to detach ourselves from ourselves

and also from specific situations, at least to the degree requisite to think, feel, and indeed

become otherwise than we have been. In particular, the mechanisms and operations of power

and are discovered in and through our entanglements and indeed complicities with these

instrumentalities and operations (i.e. in and through our experience). ‚The experience through

which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms <and the way in which we are

enabled to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them differently will be, at best, one and

the same thing.‛33 This no peripheral matter; it is rather Foucault’s central preoccupation.

Again, he is not only explicit but also emphatic about this: ‚That is really the heart of what I

do. What consequences or implications does it have? <I haven’t written a single book that

was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience. I’ve had [for example] a

complex personal relationship with madness and with the psychiatric institution.‛34 He goes

on to cite also having had ‚a certain relationship with illness and death, confessing: ‚I wrote

about the birth of the clinic and the introduction of death into medical knowledge when those

30 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 281. 31 Ibid.,, 227. 32 Ibid., 223. 33 Ibid., 244. 34 Ibid.


29

things had a certain importance for me.‛35 He acknowledges the ‚same is true of prisons and

sexuality, for different reasons.‛36 In general, then his theoretical projects are accordingly

rooted in his direct experience of specific situations. These specific situations are historically

sedimented ones (thus, ones whose intelligibility depends on seeing them in light of how they

are related to both prior human practices and contemporary cultural arrangements).

In his own manner, Dewey never tires of stressing that ‚we live from birth to death in a

world of persons and things which is what it is because of what has been done and trans-

mitted from previous human activities.‛37 The pragmatic import of this commonplace obser-

vation38 is, however, not at all evident to everyone—especially in its far-reaching and deep-

cutting implications: ‚The statement that individuals live in a world means, in the concrete, that

they live in a series of situations.‛39 From Dewey’s perspective, our being-in-the-world or

(more precisely) living-in-the-world does not refer to a vague, amorphous background against

which human agency and practices stand out; rather it designates determinate, textured situa-

tions in which we are entangled and implicated.40

In brief, we live in situ. Human experience in the Deweyan sense is an open-ended

series of successive situations, but this characterization of experience is—despite being virtu-

ally Dewey’s own—somewhat misleading. For situations are not definitely marked off from

one another—rather they are overlapping, entangled, entangling, and (in no small measure)

antagonistic affairs. The import of experience, as a transaction41 between an organism and its

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Dewey, Experience and Education. All references to this work are to Later Works of John Dewey, volume 13,

edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1991). LW 13, 22. 38 In a very late manuscript, included as an appendix to Experience and Nature, Dewey stressed: ‚The excuse

for saying obvious things is that much that now passes for empiricism is but a dialectical elaboration of data

taken from physiology [or some other technical discourse, often of a very abstract character], so that it is

necessary for any one, who seriously sets out to philosophize empirically, to recall to attention that he is

talking about the sort of thing that the unsophisticated man [or woman] calls experience, the life he [or she]

has led and undergone in the world of persons and things. Otherwise we get a stenciled stereotype in two

dimensions and in black and white instead of the solid and many colored play of activities and sufferings

which is the philosopher’s real datum.‛ (LW 1, 368-69) 39 LW 13, 25; emphasis added. 40 This concerns an almost Heideggerian aspect to Dewey’s pragmatism. As Heidegger writes: ‚Die Befind-

lichkeit erschließt das Dasein in seiner Geworfenheit und zunächst und zumeist in der Weise der aus-

weichende Abkehr.‛ (Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953) In fact John

Patrick Diggins emphasizes this in The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994)

where he writes: ‚Although Hook dismissed Heidegger’s Being and Time as metaphysical rubbish, the text

contains some parallels with pragmatism, particularly the rejection of theory and abstract understanding in

favor of the ordinary world of experience< Dewey and Heidegger<also insisted<that philosophy is

similar to human existence in that it can be understood only historically, that is in the context of changing

situations<‛ (411-412) 41 Dewey defined experience as a transaction between an organism and its environment. While he very often

used interaction to designate this process he later distinguished between interaction and transaction. Even in

his later writings, however, he was not entirely consistent in using these terms in contrast to one another

(indeed, see below in this note one of his most succinct formulations from his later writings). Neither orga-


30

environment, is the fate of being caught up in the drama of such situations.42 In one sense,

then, experience is a continuum (there are no absolute breaches in the flux of experience); but,

in another sense, experience is punctuated in such a manner that it is a self-segmenting

continuum (these segments are properly called situations). What marks off one situation from

another—that is, what punctuates the continuum of experience into more or less identifiable

segments (or ‚sentences,‛ perhaps ‚paragraphs‛ or even larger analogues of discursive units)

—are pervasive qualities (qualities coloring and thereby unifying a sequence of actions and

events in such a manner as to make of this sequence a drama or something akin to some other

aesthetic genre). The work of thought is, in Dewey’s judgment, bound up with the discern-

ment and articulation of the qualities constitutive of situations. Such work is best understood

in reference to the situated, responsive sensibility of the artistic innovator, not the abstract,

formalized procedures of some idealized inquirer.43 It is part of an aesthetic of reflection44 and,

ultimately, an aesthetic of existence. Moreover, the work of such thought is equally bound up

with practices of freedom. Loosening the grip of scientific rationality,45 partly by strengthe-

ning aesthetic intelligence, provides both an exemplar of and an instrument for twisting free

from an all too confining, perhaps even suffocating, past. The work of thought is in its most

vital, efficacious form just this process of twisting free from parts of one’s past.

nism nor environment is definable apart from the process in question (however this process is identified or

designated). ‚Experience is,‛ Dewey wrote in Art as Experience, ‚the result, the sign, and the reward of that

interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to its full, is a transformation of inter-

action into participation and communication.‛ (LW 10, 28) 42 ‚Every case of consciousness is,‛ Dewey asserts in Experience and Nature, dramatic; drama is an enhance-

ment of the conditions of consciousness.‛ (LW 1, 232) 43 This argued forcefully in Dewey’s ‚Qualitative Thought‛ (1930). All references to this essay are to Later

Works of John Dewey, volume 5 (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1984). Cited as LW 5. While qualitative judg-

ments certainly may be superficial and immature, ‚they may also sum up and integrate prolonged previous

experience and training, and bring to a unified head the results of severe and consecutive reflection‛ (LW 5,

250). The original datum is some qualitative whole in which we are implicated (bid.). ‚The logic of artistic

construction and esthetic appreciation is peculiarly significant because they exemplify in accentuated and

purified form the control of selection of detail and a mode of relation, or integration, by a qualitative whole.

The underlying quality demands certain distinctions.‛ (LW 5, 251) Qualitative thinking encompasses the

drawing of these distinctions, the marking of these differences, for the sake of the intensification of ex-

perience. (see, e.g., LW 10, 41) Such thinking is truly an instance of thinking, not just a case of emotional res-

ponse or subjective impressions. No form of thinking, including scientific inquiry, ‚gets away from qua-

litative existence. Directly, it always has its own qualitative background; indirectly, it has that of the world

in which the ordinary experience of the common man *and woman+ is lived.‛ (LW 5, 262) ‚Construction that

is artistic is as much a case of genuine thought as that expressed in scientific and philosophical matters, and

so is all genuine esthetic appreciation of art<‛ (ibid.) An aesthetic of existence in Foucault’s sense would be

illuminated by a consideration of qualitative thought in the Deweyan sense. Part of my purpose here is to

render this claim plausible. 44 For what this expression means here, see the footnote immediately above. 45 It is one thing to loosen the grip of scientific rationality, quite another to discredit or reject this form of

reason. Dewey, no less than Foucault, offers nothing less than a critique of reason or, above all, the forms of

rationality dominant in their own times. This does not make them advocates of irrationalism.


31

Polemos, Polemics, and Dialogue: The Practice of Freedom and the Work of Thought

Dewey’s emphasis on experience is, as much as anything else, an insistence upon context, an

insistence made as often in the name of situation as in that of context.46 His reconstruction of

logic as a theory of inquiry is unique or at least distinctive, in part because he not only refuses

to abstract from the situation in which we are driven to undertake an investigation, but also

because it makes situation central to any adequate treatment of the subject matter of logical

inquiry.47 As we have already noted, situation is in his logic a term of art. In Dewey’s judg-

ment, however, traditional logic is only one specific site of the theoretical occlusion for the si-

tuated character of human query. In ‚Context and Thought,‛ one of his most important

essays, Dewey stresses: ‚The significance of ‘experience’ for philosophic method is, after all,

but the acknowledgment of the indispensability of context in thinking, when that recognition

is carried to its full term.‛48 Put otherwise, ‚experience is the name of the last inclusive con-

text.‛49 He makes explicit what was implicit in his own exploration of context and thought—

the context of his efforts were to recall the importance of context, indeed the context in which

his own discourse ought to be situated. That ‚implicit context‛ is the habitual neglect by tra-

ditional philosophers of most relevant contexts in their own theoretical engagements. Dewey

goes so far as to assert that the neglect of context is ‚the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic

thinking.‛50

Context is not so much antecedently defined as continually renegotiated. Contexts are

determined by contextualization; most often this takes the shape of a retrospective account

bearing upon an ongoing deliberation. It is not only the case that definite demarcations be-

tween successive situations are hardly ever present, but also that univocal identifications of

distinguishable situations are in principle never available (however often and effectively such

identifications are imposed upon the scenes of our involvements). To live differently requires

being capable of thinking differently. In turn, to think differently51 requires being able to

name otherwise, to identify variously, the situations in which we are implicated, especially

46 Though he often treats them as equivalent, there are places in which Dewey uses situation to designate

something more specific and concrete than can be properly called a context. 47See Dewey’s ‚Logic,‛ one of his contributions to the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (LW 8, 3-12); For an

understanding and appreciation of this point, see Tom Burke’s Dewey’s New Logic (Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1994); also Douglas Browning’s ‚Designation, Characterization, and Theory in Dewey’s Logic‛ in

Dewey’s Logical Theory, edited by F. Thomas Burke et al (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002),

60ff; and, finally, Burke’s response to Browning’s essay—‚Browning on Inquiry into Inquiry, Part 1‛ in

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 45, 1 (2009), 27-44, and ‚Browning on Inquiry into Inquiry, Part 2‛

in Transactions, 45, 2 (2009), 157-76. 48

John Dewey, ‚Context and Thought‛ in The Later Works of John Dewey, volume 6, edited by Jo Ann Boyd-

ston (Carbondale, IL: Souther Illinois Press, 2008), 108., 49

Ibid. 50 LW 6, 5. 51 ‚Not because it is always thinking something new but because it never stops thinking the same things dif-

ferently.‛ (Foucault, Essential Works 3, 444) ‚My way of being no longer the same is, by definition, the most

singular part of what I am. Yet God knows there are ideological traffic police around, and we can hear their

whistles blast: go left, go right, here, later, get moving, not now< The insistence on identity and the

injunction to make a break both feel like impositions, and in the same way.‛ (Foucault, Essential Works 3, 444)


32

those situations we have become accustomed to designate univocally, such that the very possi-

bility of naming (or identifying) otherwise seems an assault on intelligibility, an eradication of

meaning. All of this is rooted in a care for the self, in particular for this self, in this set of cir-

cumstances. Dewey brings the relevance of care into focus when he notes that: ‚There is selec-

tivity (and rejection) found in every operation of thought. There is care, concern, implicated in

every act of thought. There is some who has affection for some things over others; when he

becomes a thinker he does not leave his characteristic affection behind.‛52 Foucault was not in

the least averse to acknowledging his own situated, implicated self, hence it is certain that he

would be unhesitant in avowing his animating, orienting concern (the care implicated in every

act of his thought).

Situations must themselves be situated in a field, or more accurately a multiplicity of

fields, so that a critical understanding of the power, limits, and mutability of these situations

becomes (at least) an imminent possibility and (at best) a transformative factor.

The sense in which Dewey uses the term context calls for specification. ‚Context includes

<background and selective interest.‛53 ‚Background is both temporal and spatial.‛54 That is,

‚this background in thought is both temporal and spatial.‛55 ‚The temporal background< is

intellectual as well as existential.‛56 There is ‚the background of culture‛ and, accordingly,

that of ‚theory‛ in some sense of this word.57

‚Thinking takes place,‛ Dewey notes, ‚in a scale of degrees of distance from the urgen-

cies of an immediate situation in which something has to be done,‛58 or perhaps not the urgen-

cies, but simply the constraints of such a situation, in which something might be done. Every

form of human thinking is always animated and directed, frustrated no less than facilitated, by

the qualitative context in which it emerges and by which it is sustained. Our understanding of

thinking, however, typically fails to note the depth, ubiquity, and unmatched importance of

the qualitative world in which all human thought, not only takes place, but also has its point.59

At whatever distance from the urgencies of any situation, thinking does indeed take

place. It often does so in ways that truly matter. In brief, thought can matter. In order to

grasp the efficacy of thought, however, certain distinctions need to be drawn.

52 Dewey, ‚Context and Thought,‛ 101. 53 Ibid., 98. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 99. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 100. 58 Ibid., 104. 59 ‚The world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated is,‛ Dewey

insists, ‚preeminently ma qualitative world. What we act for, suffer, and enjoy are things in their qualitative

determinations. This world forms the field of characteristic modes of thinking, characteristic in what

thought is definitely regulated by qualitative considerations.‛ (LW 5, 243) It is, however, likely that Foucault

would be disposed to distance himself from this way of stating the matter, since it would have almost

certainly sounded to him too much like the phenomenological notion of lived experience (a notion from

which he took pains to distance himself). Even so, the shared emphasis on passionate saturation in the his-

torical situation should not be occluded by an appreciation of this likely divergence.


33

However fuzzy the border between the two, it is illuminating to draw a distinction be-

tween the social and the socialized self. While Dewey tends to focus on the social self (without

in the least denying either the ubiquity of socialization or the disfigurements due to this

process), Foucault inclines toward a preoccupation with the socialized self. The social self is

inescapably the socialized self and, in turn, the socialized self is by definition the normalized

self. This being said, the social self can be conceived in such a way that s/he is not reducible to

the socialized self. Above all else, this expression might be taken to highlight both the primor-

dial sociality of the human animal and the enabling results of social constraints. The socia-

lized self is always more than a subjugated being; the processes of normalization themselves

secure, in some measure, resources for resistance.

What might surprise many readers is the extent to which Foucault takes thought to

operate of its own accord. We are, without question, socially circumscribed agents and histo-

rically situated subjects, but we are also thoughtful beings. In addition, thought is not so much

wind (i.e., it is not ineffectual musings in the recesses of an allegedly private consciousness,

impotent manipulations of mostly public symbols for private fantasies lacking any objective

mooring). Foucault was a person given to thought in a very strong sense, a sense he occasio-

nally took pains to defend. Indeed, he devoted his life to thinking over and thinking through

the situations in which we are enmeshed, i.e. situations by which he was partly defined.

The Foucaultian subject is always (at least, potentially) the thoughtful self. The

thoughtful self, a being capable of inaugurating and sustaining various, even conflicting or

contradictory lines of thought, is however an agent capable of twisting free from the dominant

discourses and normalizing practices of its time and place. The thoughtful self contains within

itself the resources for being more than the merely socialized self, for being other than what it

actually or habitually is. Whatever the depth and degree of this self’s indebtedness to its so-

ciality (however much our capacity for thinking depends on our relations to others), thought

is potentially efficacious. When the self is in dialogue with itself, it is not condemned simply

to reenact roles acquired in its initiation into its culture, much less to repeat lines learned by

the self in its exchanges with others. The self in dialogue with itself can be a matrix of novelty,

a source of innovation.60

We need to guard against conceiving the social world in such a way that our con-

ception precludes the possibility, development, or efficacy of reflexive processes (‚thought‛)

wherein the self is able to turn upon itself, even against itself, and thereby deploy resources to

become other than it has been. ‚We need to free ourselves of the sacralization of the social as

the only instance of the real and stop regarding that essential element in human life and

human relations—I mean thought—as so much wind. Thought does exist, both beyond and

before systems and edifices of discourse.‛61 For Foucault (also for Dewey62), the practice of

freedom is inseparable from the actuality of thought. ‚There is always a little thought occur-

ring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits.‛63 The

60 This is the facet of the subject, identified as such, stressed by Dewey. See, e.g., Dewey, Experience and

Nature. 61 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 456. 62 See, e.g., chapter 5 of Dewey’s Experience and Education (LW 13, 39-42). 63 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 456.


34

denial of this fosters, at the very least, complicity with despair, the sense that all efforts at

altering our institutions and practices are doomed to fail. ‚Criticism consists in uncovering

that thought occurring in the most stupid institutions, that implicit in silent habits] and trying

to change it, etc‛64 Such criticism is both derived from and aimed at experience, for it is work

undertaken ‚on the basis of elements of my own experience.‛65 In his own case, this meant

‚*a+bandoning the empty form of a world revolution‛66 and adopting in its place the over-

flowing form of local resistance. Such resistance enjoins immersion and saturation in the si-

tuations into which one has been thrown.67

Such saturation in situations68 involves the intensification of experience. Dewey bears

eloquent witness to this experiential process when he writes in Art as Experience:

Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its

uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to

deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of

Shakespeare and Keats.69

Though it may not be readily apparent, what Dewey means by deliberation is either just this

process of intensification, or a process undertaken in the service of turning experience upon

itself for the sake of deepening and intensifying the qualities of experience. His distinctive

understanding of deliberation holds an important clue for discovering his distinctive con-

ception of morals. In turn, his conception of morals points to a deep affinity between Dewey

and Foucault. Coming to understanding more critically the meaning of our own actions is

closely akin to thinking the unthought (to invoke Foucault’s striking expression).

‚The present, not the future, is ours,‛70 but it is ours primarily as the result of an

appropriation, a process of making it our own, by remaking both the self and the situations in

64 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 456. As Stephen Watson notes, ‚thought itself became [for Foucault]

recognized as a perilous act, an event devoid not only of worldly foundation but of the codes of an ethos, the

universal consensus of a polis, or demonstrable laws,‛ (‚‘Between Tradition and Oblivion’: Foucault, the

complications of form, the literatures of reason, and the aesthetics of existence,‛ in The Cambridge Companion

to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 276). 65 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 458. 66 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 447. 67 Cf. Arnold Davidson in Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 121. 68 The drive to saturate oneself in the situations of one’s life is, strikingly, once again one endorsed by Emer-

son (a direct influence on Dewey and, arguably, an indirect one, through Nietzsche, on Foucault). This is

nowhere more manifest than in one of Emerson’s entries in his voluminous journals: ‚The man thinks he can

know this or that, by words and writing. It can only be known or done organically. He must plunge into the

universe, and live in its form—sink to rise. None any work can frame unless himself become the same.‛

Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982),

452... Closely connected to this is H. D. Thoreau’s characterization in Walden of the intellect as a snout with

which we burrow more deeply into some place. The ideal of aloof transcendence is here (rather ironically

given the title ‚transcendentalists‛) being here displaced by that of passionate involvement and as complete

immersion (or saturation) as possible. 69 LW 10, 41. 70 MW 14, 144.


35

which it is implicated. This involves discerning the implications of our own exertions, utte-

rances, strivings, and even desires. If we are successful in this, then ‚we come to know the

meaning of present acts, and to guide them in the light of that meaning. The moral is to deve-

lop conscientiousness, ability to judge the significance of what we are doing and to use that

judgment in directing what we do <‛71 This does not mean ‚the direct cultivation of some-

thing called conscience‛ but rather ‚fostering those impulses and habits which experience has

shown to make us sensitive, generous, imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of

our inchoate dawning activities.‛72 This demands, ‚the auditing of present impulse and ha-

bit.‛ The delicate task of doing so is explicitly related by Dewey to one of our main themes,

for the ‚important thing is,‛ he stresses, ‚the fostering of those habits and impulses which lead

to a broad, just sympathetic survey of situations.‛73

The work of surveying situations in this fashion, for this purpose, is nothing other than

deliberation in its distinctively Deweyan sense. ‚Deliberation *so understood+ is irrational in

the degree in which an end is so fixed, a passion or interest so absorbing, that the foresight of

consequences is warped to include only what furthers execution of its predetermined bias.

Deliberation is [in contrast] rational in the degree in which forethought flexibly remakes old

aims and habits, institutes perception and love of new ends and acts.‛74

‚Morals means growth of conduct in meaning.‛75 If we wanted to distill these insights

into an imperative we should say: ‚‘So act as to increase the meaning of present experience.’

But even then in order to get instruction about the concrete quality of such increased meaning

we should have to run away from law and study the needs and alternative possibilities lying

with a unique and localized situation.‛76 Hence, it turns out that even this imperative, ‚like

everything absolute, is sterile.‛77

Given the historical circumstances of Foucault’s life, he tended to stress ‚practices of

freedom over processes of liberation.‛78 ‚You have situations where liberation and the struggle

for liberation are indispensable for the practice of freedom. With respect to sexuality, for

example—and I am not indulging in polemics, because I don’t like polemics, I think they are

usually futile<‛79 Even so, the struggles of individuals to define and refashion their own sex-

uality is a question of liberation as much as ‚Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics.

Without the actuality of freedom there is no possibility of ethics. But ethics is the considered

form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.”80

71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., emphasis added. 74 MW 14, 138. 75 Ibid., 194. 76 Ibid., 196. 77 Ibid. 78 Foucault, Essential Works 1, 283; emphasis added. See also Brad Stone’s contribution to this issue of Fou-

cault Studies. 79 Foucault, Essential Works 1, 284. 80 Foucault, Essential Works 1, 284; emphasis added. Cf. Dewey.


36

The considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection is an in-

herently unstable, historically situated form. Moreover, it is informed by reflection in various

ways. At this juncture, two ways are especially worthy of our attention. For Foucault’s early

characterization of dreams and his later gloss on fascism are relevant to our exploring the

practice of freedom.

First, then, experience in dreaming ‚restores the movement of freedom in its authentic

meaning, showing how it establishes itself or alienates itself, how it constitutes itself as radical

respon-sibility in the world, or how it forgets itself and abandons itself to its plunge in

causality.‛81 Our experience of dreaming is, at least for the early Foucault, far from irrelevant

to the dream of fashioning an experience, in which freedom is vividly and dramatically

realized here and now (amid these scenes and struggles, entangled in these relations of power

and enmeshed in these regimes of normalization).

Second, the practice of freedom as envisioned by Foucault is also a struggle against

fascism however, against the manifest forms of historical fascism, but also the subtler forms

operative in social life and indeed the recesses of our own subjectivity82—that is, ‚the fascism

in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power,

to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.‛83

Foucault is a paradoxical thinker in being one who so unsparingly endorses an ago-

nistic (in the original sense, a ‚polemical‛) view of human existence, yet who so conscien-

tiously disparages discursive polemics. On the one side, he insists: ‚The history which bears

and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not

relations of meaning.‛84 On the other side, Foucault is repulsed by the ethos of polemics, those

81 Michel Foucault, ‚Dream, Imagination and Existence‛ in Dream and Existence, a special issue of Review of

Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, edited by Keith Hoeller, volume XIX, number 1, 31-78. Cf. James W.

Bernhauer and Michael Mahon’s ‚The ethics of Michel Foucault‛ in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault

(NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 142-43. 82 In ‚Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid,‛ Virginia Woolf asks, ‚If we were free we should be out in the open,

dancing, at the play, of sitting at the window talking together. What is it that prevents us?‛ ‚Her‛ answer

in a word is: ‚‘Hitler!’ The loudspeakers cry with one voice. Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of

power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free.‛ In truth, her answer is more nuanced,

her voice more oppositional than one might imagine for someone so resolutely opposed to fascism. If the

pilot in the plane overhead protecting Woolf and others ‚stops to think he may be killed; and we too. So let

us think for him. Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It

is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made

visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women< They

are the slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from

tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.‛ (Virgina Woolf, Collected Essays, volume 4, 174) ‚We must,‛ Woolf goes

on to insist, ‚help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations.

We must create more honorable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instincts,

their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for his loss of his gun.‛ (175; cf. ‚The Moral

Equivalent of War‛ by William James and also the writings by Jane Addams on these topics) 83 Foucault, ‚Preface‛ to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii. 84 Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon (NY:

Pantheon Books, 1977), 114.


37

exchanges, in which the annihilation of one’s adversary is—at least, in principle—warranted

in some situations. ‚That’s not,‛ he asserts, ‚my way of doing things; I don’t belong to a

world of people who do things that way. In insisting on this difference [between polemics and

dialogue] as something essential: a whole morality is a stake, the morality that concerns the

search for the truth and the relation to the other.‛85 This morality concerns not only this search

and this relation, but also the focus of our concern—the practice of freedom itself. ‚In the se-

rious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, etc.‛86 ‚The pole-

mist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will

never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and

making that struggle a just undertaking <‛87

When his reaction to polemics is not one of distaste or even disgust, Foucault’s attitude

tends to be bemusement. ‚This great theme of ideological struggle makes me smile a little, gi-

ven that each individual’s theoretical ties, when they are examined in their history, are tangled

and fluctuating and don’t have the clear definition of a border which an enemy could be

forced to flee.‛ On the hand, he wanted to puncture the exaggerated self-importance of self-

avowed intellectuals: ‚Don’t intellectuals hope to give themselves, through ideological strug-

gle, a greater political weight than they really have?‛ On the other hand, he wanted to trans-

form polemical relations into cooperative ones: ‚Wouldn’t it be more serious, instead, to do

research side by side, if in rather divergent directions?‛

The transformation of this relationship is, at bottom, linked to Foucault’s struggle

against fascism. ‚If one always insists,‛ he adds in the interview from which I have been quo-

ting, ‚on saying that one is fighting an enemy, if a day comes when one finds oneself in a situ-

ation of actual warfare, which can always happen, will one then be tempted to treat him as

such? That route leads directly to oppression; it is dangerous.‛ The work of understanding is

not irrelevant even in the situation of being at war with the other, especially when this work

resolutely refuses to take the form simply of righteous indignation and unqualified antago-

nism. It is telling that in this connection, Foucault exhibits a fallibilist sensibility, one of the

defining traits of the pragmatist orientation: Rather than manifesting a desire to be taken se-

riously by ‚simulating warfare against an ideological opponent,‛ it ‚would be wiser to con-

sider that those with whom one disagrees have made a mistake, or that one hasn’t understood

what they were trying to do.‛88

Conclusion

There is no deeper affinity between John Dewey and Michel Foucault than the patient and

painstaking labor both devoted to the always-justifiable impatience for freedom.89 This is the

85 Foucault, Essential Works 1 [Penguin], 111. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 112. 88 Foucault, Essential Works 3, 297. 89 ‚I take care not to dictate how things should be. I try instead to pose problems, to make them active, to

display them in such a complexity that they can silence the prophets and lawgivers, all those who speak for

others or to others. In this way, it will be possible for the complexity of the problem to appear in its connec-

tion with people’s lives; and, consequently, through concrete questions, difficult cases, movements of rebellion,

reflections, and testimonies, the legitimacy of a common creative action can also appear. It’s a matter of


38

center of each thinker’s vision. If they diverge on some of the most important particulars re-

garding such patient labor (as I take them to diverge), it is above all because Dewey was more

at home in his culture than Foucault was in his.90 The depth and respects in which Dewey

was at odds with his time and place should not be overlooked or minimized. Without igno-

ring or underplaying this, Dewey was less estranged from his culture than Foucault was from

his. This points more than anything to the dramatic difference between being a straight and a

gay person. In addition, it points to the differing evaluations of experiential qualities—above

all, the evaluation by Foucault of limit-experiences as a means of intensifying life and that by

Dewey of aesthetic experience sustaining, deepening, securing and enlarging as well as inten-

sifying the qualitative immediacy of our situated engagements. Finally, Dewey’s tendency to

link the practices of freedom to questions of meaning and Foucault’s proclivity to allow a pre-

occupation with freedom to usurp considerations of meaning (more pointedly, his refusal to

connect the question of freedom with that of meaning) is, arguably, not insignificant. To live

under the sign of freedom is, for Foucault, to have freed the self from the hegemony of semi-

otics, from the regime of signs.91

Pace Rorty, Dewey was not waiting for Foucault at the end of the road down which the

latter was travelling; however, he did explore some of the terrain later traversed by Foucault.

Moreover, the paths forged by Dewey in this exploration, do cross some of those blazed by

Foucault (cf. William James in ‚Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results‛ on philo-

sophical inquirers being trail blazers). Their various intersections display a complex pattern of

salient connections, not a simple priority (Dewey having arrived somewhere first) or even un-

problematic kinship. This pattern is and ought to be problematic, because in the name of

Dewey no less than Foucault, it needs to be problematized (and thus rendered in critical

respects variously problematic). Questions of reception and appropriation, of blurring decisive

differences and blunting critical edges, of historical specificity and cultural location, need not

only be raised, but also pressed. My own efforts have ultimately been for the sake of pre-

paring the basis for work on such questioning. Even so, those who have re-traced the steps of

Dewey and, in far rarer instances, traced out some of the trajectories of his thought beyond

anything he accomplished92 are likely to benefit by deviating from these paths (by traveling

along over terrain with which they are unfamiliar), even following the lead of those drawn to

re-tracing the ways blazed by Foucault. It is also likely that the converse is true. The texts of

Dewey no less than those of Foucault provide us with nothing less than the resources for en-

working through things little by little, of introducing modifications that are able if not to find solutions, at

least to change the given terms of the problem.‛ (Foucault, EW 3, 288; emphasis added) It is a matter, in a

word, of experimenting, hence, of trying ‚to see how far the liberation of thought can go toward making

these trans-formations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out, and sufficiently difficult to carry

out for them to be deeply inscribed in reality.‛ (Foucault, EW 3, 457) 90 On this point in Foucault see Paul Rabinow’s ‚Foucault’s Untimely Struggle: Toward a Form of Spiritua-

lity,‛ Theory, Culture and Society 26(6), (2009), 25-44. 91 See Foucault’s Foreword to Anti-Oedipus. 92 One of the deepest ironies regarding American pragmatism is the extent to which those who identify with

this philosophical movement are so often engaged in unimaginative exegesis of familiar texts rather than

actually putting pragmatism to work.


39

visioning an expansive array of alluring possibilities—in my judgment, none more important

than the possibilities for imagining the practice of freedom, understood as the innermost mea-

ning of ethical practice (of what it means, at bottom, to be ethical).

The debilitating constraints of the socialized self are inseparable from the enabling con-

straints of the social self (indeed, they are often, if not always, the very same constraints). If

Foucault focused rather obsessively (at least until his last years) upon the debilitating and

disfiguring constraints of the socialized self, the normalized subject, and if in turn Dewey

celebrated somewhat uncritically the creative and emancipatory potential of the social self

(above all, the capacity of such a self to enhance or even forge relationships with others, en-

tirely free of exploitation or patronage, antagonism or aggression), this reflects different sensi-

bilities, also contrasting strategic identities and concerns. These are truly differences that

make a difference, in different situations in different ways. Precisely because this is the case,

such differences help us discern the depth and multiplicity of affinities between John Dewey

and Michel Foucault.

If I, hopefully showing signs of being a patient laborer, have done something to bring

these diverse considerations into critical play, then it will have been justified. For it is always,

in the end, a question of what can be played.93 To bring Foucault into play in the context of

Dewey’s work—or Dewey in that of Foucault’s—can be an idle comparison, a merely acade-

mic exercise. It still holds, however, the promise of contributing to our understanding of how

to take up anew the practice of freedom. The promise of possibility—especially the unantici-

pated promises of polymorphous possibilities (cf. MF)—seems, to me at least, the most appro-

priate form of articulation in which claims regarding the practice of freedom are uttered. Our

impatience for freedom is nowhere more manifest than in the disorders and disordering of our

desires. Neither Dewey nor Foucault took these to be the substance of freedom as such, but

they can be occasions for practices of freedom.

The disruption of established harmony, resulting from (above all else) the play of dis-

ordering desires, is in itself an aim of the practice to which John Dewey and Michel Foucault

devoted their intellectual lives. The inescapable conclusion that their intellectual lives were

one with their political struggles, makes of their deep affinities and even deeper divergences a

constellation of positions, to be configured now in this manner and reconfigured soon after-

wards in this other way. The power of intelligence—that of thought—is nowhere more evi-

dent than in our ability to make our practices more reasonable, our institutions more intel-

ligent, especially when we are able to do so in such a manner that the very forms of rationality,

our understanding of intelligence itself, are transfigured.94 The life and work of Dewey and

93 ‚We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable

challenge of the question: What can be played?” (Foucault, Essential Works 1, 140; emphasis added) ‚The

problem, then, is,‛ as Foucault also asserts, ‚to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and

also the morality, the ēthos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as

little domination as possible‛ (Foucault, Essential Works 1, 298). Possibilities are inscribed in the folds and

interstices of the actual world in which human agents are thrown. If philosophical thought is a maieutic art,

it is because it concerns assisting in the birth of such possibilities. 94 ‚If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dange-

rous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. One should not


40

Foucault bear witness to these possibilities.95 They hold out the promise of nothing less than

this.

Vincent Colapietro

Department of Philosophy

240 Sparks Building

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802

USA

forget – and I am not saying this to criticize rationality, but in order to show how ambiguous things are – it

was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming

one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was, of course, irrationality, but an irra-

tionality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality.‛ (Foucault, ‚Space, Knowledge,

and Power‛ in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (NY: Pantheon Books, 1984), 249) 95 In the ‚Introduction‛ for the 1948 edition of Reconstruction of Philosophy Dewey quoted C. D. Darlington, in

his judgment ‚a distinguished English man of science‛ (MW 12, 262): ‚We need a Ministry of Disturbance, a

regulated source of annoyance; a destroyer of routine; an underminer of complacency.‛ Immediately after

quoting Darlington, Dewey adds: ‚The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in

the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an

occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable<‛ (MW 12, 263) This is

even truer of social transformation. If anything Foucault played this role more vibrantly and effectively than

even Dewey.

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